Community Informatics Multimedia Archive

IL College-in-Prison Program Brings Hope to Families of the Incarcerated

In January, Danville Correctional Center (DCC) became the only Illinois prison to offer upper-level college courses to incarcerated people. This was made possible by the Education Justice Project (EJP), a college-in-prison program created and staffed by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professors and graduate students. This semester, 54 non-degree status students are enrolled in one of four courses being offered at the facility. These include Islamic Architecture and the Built Environment, Landscape and Human Health, Experiencing Modernity: Urban Literature, and Writing for a Change: For Business, for Life.

New Philadelphia to be featured on WILL’s Prairie Fire

The historic town of New Philadelphia, Illinois, the earliest town planned and legally founded by an African American in the United States, will be featured on the 2009 premiere of Prairie Fire, a WILL-TV show about Central Illinois. The premiere takes place at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 26. GSLIS and African American Studies Professor Abdul Alkalimat is the great-great-grandson of the town’s founder and gives an interview on the segment about New Philadelphia’s role in the Underground Railroad.

The Public Engagement Symposium, then “Let’s Eat Together!”

An inaugural one-day symposium and showcase held on March 9, 2009, featured dozens of public engagement projects that have emerged out of partnerships among faculty, staff and community members. A number of these activities are tied to the Community Informatics Initiative to some degree. Will Patterson, Office of Inter and Intra Cultural Relations, and Ken Salo, of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, led a “participatory idea exchange” on I-Powered, an effort to “do some good in the ‘hood.” The East St. Louis Action Research Project (ESLARP) and 4-H were represented with panels and posters. Taylor Willingham, an adjunct instructor at GSLIS, gave a presentation on “Finding the Public Voice for Public Schools,” a collaboration that uses structured dialogue to tackle community problems. Willingham teaches “Community Engagement” online, an integral course in the CI curriculum. Martin Wolske, senior research scientist in the Community Informatics Initiative, displayed a poster related to his “Introduction to Networking” course. Wolske’s poster traced the development of his approach from a service-learning model to one of deeper civic engagement.

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This month's featured project is the Community Inquiry Labs (iLabs)

To learn more about the various projects in CII please visit our projects page.

Community Inquiry Labs (iLabs)

The Community Inquiry Laboratory (iLab) project develops both conceptual frameworks and open source software, using the digital archives, Google tools, and a host of mashup of open-source tools that foster collaboration. The iLabs project grew out of the Inquiry Page, a collaborative endeavor of people interested in inquiry pedagogy and philosophy that was begun by Chip Bruce in 1995.

Currently, the iLabs site and trainings provide a web-based suite of software tools that can be used to form an interactive Web site, and is free of cost to all users. Users create an iLab by filling out a simple Web form that determines which tools and features they want to include on their Web site. The project goals are to research and explore:

• ways in which the community emphasizes support for collaborative activity

• how people create knowledge that is connected to people's values, history, and lived experiences

• how inquiry points and interests can support open-ended, democratic, participatory engagement

• how the iLab creates a space and resources to bring theory and action together in an experimental and critical manner

• how iLab software is itself developed through an open process of inquiry in which users participate.

iLabs development is carried out by an ever-changing and growing group of participants, whose members include university researchers, students, community activists, and educators representing a variety of settings and grade levels. People around the world have used iLabs to create interactive websites for school and university courses, research projects, neighborhood action, etc.  Development work is supported through volunteer work, in-kind institutional commitments and grant funds. Today, the Co Principal Investigators for iLabs are Chip Bruce and Ann Bishop, with funding from National Science Foundation. In the past, iLabls has hosted community inquiry workshops both on and off campus as a means to learn about ways to foster community organization and information sharing.  

To learn more about the various projects in CII please visit our projects page.

A Variety of Opportunities in Community Informatics:

CI courses are open to all qualified students across campus, and CII sponsors a speaker series, brown bag events, and workshops. There are also research and volunteer opportunities. You can learn more about all of those by joining the listserv , by checking the calendar on the homepage, or through exploring this site.

When applying to GSLIS be sure and indicate your interest in community informatics. Once you have been admitted to GSLIS, you will receive information about how to apply for financial aid, some of which is earmarked for students in community informatics. To apply for funding through community informatics you will need an up-to-date resume and a letter of application to Professors Ann Bishop and Caroline Haythornthwaite. You also will be assigned an advisor based on your interests.